It's Friday, isn't it?

Must be Friday; I'm wearing a Hawaiian shirt.  That's a pretty good sign.  Otherwise, the days tend to get all scrambled.

Had to do some further setting up for the ToasterCo project: communication didn't appear to be happening, so I figured I should connect the serial console to the loaner PC and have it and the comm test program in the same place.

So, install TeraTerm.  Find a couple of USB extension cables and string them from the PC to the work table.  Plug in the serial dongle.

Windows can't find the driver.  It needs an Internet connection.  Grrrr... find a Cat 6 cable of suitable length.  Connect it.  Fiddle with... wait... find where this flavor of Windows keeps those settings, then fiddle the settings from what worked with the odd-hack 2019 network configuration to the current slightly less odd configuration.  Unplug and replug the dongle.  Shows up as a Prolific PL2303, which makes sense; I bought a few non-FTDI serial dongles because the FTDI driver on Linux conflicts with using FTDI-based non-UART dongles.  Try to use it; it doesn't work, and I notice that to the COM3: name is appended a message about it not being a genuine Prolific chip.  Guess somebody sole me a Prochoicic chip somewhere along the line; plays nice with Linux, but not with the official driver.  Dig around in the storage bins for another dongle: this one works.

Step away from the tech stuff and make a shopping run: Home Depot (for a top rail for a shelving system, which somehow I'd forgotten to buy along with the rails and whatnot) and Walmart (for various stuff, including a bargain on a bunch of 12 quart storage bins).

Let the indoors chicken play with the rest of the flock on the lawn for a while, meanwhile (while Joy guards them) replacing the soiled coop-straw with fresh and hauling the old stuff down to the compost heap.

Remainder of the day... aside from fixing dinner and whatnot, I need to run some sort of comm test on that toaster setup and poke things with a scope to get a handle on what's going on.  I hope I just have a wire wrong somewhere.

 

Oh, yes: dinner.  Reminds me that yesterday I made my first batch of from-scratch biscuits in living memory.  Found a basic recipe on line, substituted white whole wheat flour for regular flour, substituted butter for "shortening", and went for it.  Came out basically OK, though I think the recipe needs some fiddling to accommodate whole wheat. Anyway, it worked a heck of a lot better than the recipe on the Bisquick box.

Comments

[Rob]

I've got eight Aloha shirts, I wear one everyday (my Florida uniform) unless the weather is crappy. I have a hard time putting one on when it's 60 and cloudy out... then I have pocket polo shirts for those days.